Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR4 vs X1950 Pro GDDR3 Review

Jetway has gone through the trouble to deviate from the ATI reference design and come up with a X1950 Pro video card packed with 512Mb GDDR4 memory chips. We compare its performance to the vanilla X1950 Pro with GDDR3 to see if there are any improvements performance wise.

Introduction & In the Box

Introduction

The Jetway company name might not ring a bell with many people, but it’s possible you have seen or even owned one of their products. Jetway is a large manufacturers responsible for providing other vendors with their hardware, this include NVIDIA and ATI video cards. Not so long ago Jetway has been more aggressively pushing their own product lines, and today we have their latest ATI card in for test.

Dollarshops did not send us the HD 2xxx series, but rather the previous generation X1950 Pro card. What count warrant another look at this mid-range DX9 video card as we already tested two of them here? Jetway has come up with a custom design X1950 Pro model, fitting it with GDDR4 memory chips.

GDDR4 in the box

Where as the standard X1950 Pro from Jetway comes with 512Mb GDDR3 memory clocked at 600 (1200Mhz DDR), the GDDR4 version has higher clocks speeds, Rivatuner displays the memory running at 800Mhz ( 1600Mhz DDR) while first specifications seen at Cebit had it clocked higher at 2200Mhz.

GPU core wise Rivatuner gave these values:

X1950 Pro GDDR3: 575Mhz

X1950 Pro GDDR4: 570Mhz

The GDDR4 unit we received is one of the first pre-production samples in existence, which might explain the different specs. The sample did not come in a box, but if it were, included goodies are the same as the Jetway GDDR3 edition:

Manual & Drivers CD

4-pin Y-splitter

S-Video Out Cable

VGA->DVI connector

Let’s take a closer look ->

Comment
from RichBa5tard@ 2007/06/04

Sad thing that the GDDR4 doesn't overclock... it might have been interesting if it was.

Comment
from jmke@ 2007/06/04

pre-production sample might have something to do with that

Comment
from Massman@ 2007/06/04

Have you tested overclocking with other tools than AtiTool? Maybe it had compability issues

Comment
from jmke@ 2007/06/04

X1950 Pro doesn't play with many other tools it seems ATI Tray Tools same results, didn't try powerstrip